1. The Field of the Invention
This invention relates to systems, methods, and computer program products related to website analytics.
2. Background and Relevant Art
Websites are increasingly more common and important for organizations to convey information to clients, or otherwise provide goods and services for sale to customers. As such, organizations typically take great interest to identify the effectiveness of their websites: i.e., whether the efforts and resources they dedicate to providing web content have the desired effect. One way to gauge effect is to determine how often others are visiting particular web pages, when are others visiting the web pages, and who is visiting the web pages. There are a wide range of mechanisms for tracking this type of information, and such mechanisms range in complexity.
For example, more rudimentary analytics code employs mechanisms for tracking web page visits (“traffic”) such as a simple counter that increments each time another computer system requests the given web page from the web server. Such mechanisms can tell an organization whether a particular web page has more traffic compared with another web page, but any additional information beyond that tends to be fairly limited. By contrast, more complex analytics code employs mechanisms for monitoring web page requests using a “tracking pixel.” In short, a tracking pixel is an image file (or other small file) that a computer system requests for display in a user interface, such as a web browser. This request occurs when the computer system processing the web page encounters and executes the analytics code containing the tracking pixel request.
Since the file associated with the tracking pixel is typically only very small (e.g., one pixel by one pixel), the request itself for the tracking pixel file tends to be much more important than display of the image file itself (Conventional tracking pixels are transparent pixels that are never seen). Conventional tracking pixel requests can comprise a wide range of settings and variables that allows organizations to make complex determinations about the end user. As a result, analysis of tracking pixel requests can provide, among other things, information about who is making web page requests, when or where such web page requests were made, and what other web pages the end user viewed before or after downloading the web page with the tracking pixel.
Unfortunately, there are a number or difficulties that can befall use of such analytics code (i.e., tracking pixel requests, etc.), regardless of complexity. Such difficulties generally relate to failure of the client system to properly request and execute the analytics code. For example, there may be an error in other source code that causes the client to stop downloading and rendering the remaining code on the web page before encountering the tracking pixel. In other cases, the source code which generates the request for the tracking pixel may have been removed, truncated or misspelled, or the variables in the code outdated.
Compounding these difficulties is the notion that many organizations now generate web pages automatically upon request by a client computer system. The existence of analytics code on the created web page thus often depends on the database being up to date, and/or that the instructions used by the server to generate the webpage are also designed correctly and up to date. One will appreciate that failure by a client computer system to receive and/or render analytics code can cause a website owner to believe interest has been lost in a certain web page, while the contrary may actually be the case.
Conventional mechanisms for monitoring the presence of correct analytics code are generally manual in nature, and often include technically-trained people reviewing code on variously identified web pages (or code for generating web pages) to identify errant code, or the potential for errant code. Not only are such mechanisms very expensive, but they are often error prone, and may often generate a significant number of false positives. For example, conventional mechanisms (e.g., using text searching) may be able to determine that the tracking pixel code is correctly written—or positioned on a web page in the correct place—but may otherwise be unable to determine that the tracking pixel code will work as intended by missing other failures in the source code.
Accordingly, there are a number of problems in the art that can be addressed.